As of 1 October 2014, Microsoft revised their Office 365 for business plans. Enterprise plans remain the same, but here’s the new line up for small to mid-size businesses.

Office 365 Business Essentials

This plan does not include Office applications to install on your PC, notebook, tablet or smartphone, but you can access Office Online for Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. It also gives you:

• Hosted Exchange for email
• Lync Basic for online meetings and video conferencing
• Intranet sites for your team and business class social networking.

Office 365 Business

This plan includes Office applications that you install on your PC, notebook, tablet and smartphone, as well as Office Online and 1TB of online storage per user. It doesn’t include any of the other features of Office 365 (so no email, video conferencing or Intranet sites).

Office 365 Business Premium

This plan includes:

• Office desktop applications
• Office Online
• Hosted Exchange
• Lync basic
• Intranet sites for your team

Things to note – all of the business plans have a 300 users limit so if you have more users than that you’ll obviously need to move to an Enterprise plan. You would also need to consider an Enterprise plan if you:

• Need Microsoft Access
• Need to record your online meetings and video conferences
• Need to provide your IT team or partner with detailed configuration options and greater control (recommended)
• Would like to analyse your business data utilising Microsoft’s Business Intelligence tools
• Are interested in business process improvement utilising forms and workflows

If you’d like to know more or need help selecting the right plan for your business, give us a call or visit our Office 365 page for more details.